Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Alternate Lighting Techniques #1

Time is fluid, but we freeze it. Time runs, but we catch it. Time moves, but we stop it. Yet so rarely do we let it bloom.

The studio photographer has planted his flag in a world of strobes and sub-second shutter speeds. In most cases, we only care for the smallest shards of time.

But there's another world out there, one as foreign to our eyes as dali's cat frozen in edgarton's drop of milk. In taking a picture, the photographer takes time as his own: to shape, to stretch, to compress... to fold time in upon itself. He can make a moment out of eternity.

And he doesn't need photoshop to do it.

The image above was shot at f/4 and exposed for 12 seconds. It was lit with a fiber optic attached to the end of a flashlight. Red shift is controlled by proximity to the skin, as the fiber optic grazes it, light passes through the first few layers and illuminates our blood, which glows red. Too much pressure will cause the fiberoptic to 'skip and skitter' across the surface, causing a jagged illumination path. The light acts as a brush with which you must paint your photograph. "Lightstroke" is akin to the brushstroke, ultimately determining the texture of the image.

Quality of the light (soft/hard) plays by new rules in this realm; distance matters little, motion is key. Dynamic movement over time increases the effective size of the illuminating source--a 5mm source-aperture can mimic a 4 foot softbox. Nonetheless, the true beauty of painting with light is that it doesn't usually look like an octobank, a beauty dish, or a fresnel--but something we've never seen before. Such lighting operates in a time-space continuum, thereby imparting your photographs with the visual possibilities of an entire renaissance.

The photograph killed the painting. It's time that we made amends.

Fifteen Seconds: One Instant.

Key Light, Fill Light, Back Light: One Light.

FUSION

Painting with light is a remarkable technique, but it doesn't have to spend all its time in the dark alone. In the next image I worked with 8 second exposures and blended the chiseling of a strobe with the sparks of a cigarette lighter.

My few forays into time-variant illumination have barely pierced the darkness. May your adventures into this realm map out new light for new times.